When Hassan joined Meteor's IT department in 2006, he was pleasantly surprised to find everyone abuzz with excitement.

Months earlier, the previous CIO retired, and a new Head of IT had just been appointed, bringing with him the mandate that old Pentium III PCs that sat on each desk had to go. With 128MB, they struggled to keep up with Windows NT 4.0 and Office 97. He had persuaded the board to allocate millions to replace every workstation and server, and upgrade the infrastructure to match. The company would move on up to the heady delights of Windows XP SP2, Office 2007 and Exchange 2003.

“It seems every other week,” Samuel writes, “there’s a story about outsourcing gone bad. Maybe we’ve been lucky, but for the past decade or so, we simply couldn’t have survived without our friendly team of offsite developers.”

“You see, I work for a manufacturing company, and our main campus is located a good half-hour away from the outskirts of a suburb of a sparsely populated Midwestern city. Every business in town – from the dry cleaners to the restaurants – is owned or subsidized by the company. Just about every resident works, worked, or will work for the company. ”

"Working in IT, I see lots of error messages," writes Eric, "this one, however, was unique. Apparently the computer didn't nobulate quite right..."

"Half the world's IT people hate our company's guts," Aaron told the HR lady. "For once, can we hire someone from the other half?"

"The last round of consultants didn't hate us," she replied.

"This code was left by the Senior Software Consultant," Michael Wheeler writes, "I'm not sure if it's insurance against 'Return' not returning... or a comment that explained why the line of code was left in."

Public Shared Function GetItemFromValue(ByVal ddlControl As DropDownList) As Integer
    Dim i As Integer
    If ddlControl.Items.Count > 0 Then
        For i = 0 To ddlControl.Items.Count - 1
            If ddlControl.Items(i).Selected() Then
                Return i
                Exit For     'leaving this here cause we're in a rush
            End If
        Next
    End If
End Function

“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”

“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed. “No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”

“I was hired as a ‘best practices consultant’ to help bring a 300-developer company’s development practices into the 21st century,” wrote Ian, “and after six months, I had failed.”

“Our first objective was to introduce automated unit testing. They had all sorts of horribly interconnected code, and the tests would help reduce the fix-here/break-there problems. However, after many, many tutorial sessions with developers, and quite a few long meetings spent trying to convince them of the benefits, no tests emerged. The developers stubbornly held that testers should test code, not them.”

"I've heard about verified by Visa, but this is something new," writes Velmu.

It's time once again for Share Your Bizarre Email day! mail in or post your favorite emails in the comments. Here's three to get started...

"My company takes safety very seriously," Adam wrote, "and here is a partially illustrative message. What's especially funny about it is that we receive examples and protips like this on a routine basis."

“Our codebase is a bit... backwards, to say the least,” writes Aaron Silver, “things that should go up don’t go up or down... instead, they’re painted orange .”

“The postProcessAddress address method is a good example of all of this.”